Currently the only way to convert a scalar to a vector is to
use absent(), which isn't very clean. This adds a vector()
function that's the inverse of scalar() and lets your optionally
set labels.
Example usage would be
vector(time() % 86400) < 3600
to filter to only the first hour of the day.
When doing comparison operations on vectors, filtering
sometimes gets in the way and you have to go to a fair bit of
effort to workaround it in order to always return a result.
The 'bool' modifier instead of filtering returns 0/1 depending
on the result of the compairson.
This is also a prerequisite to removing plain scalar/scalar comparisons,
as it maintains the current behaviour under a new syntax.
`keep_common` is more in line with the function name
`drop_common_labels()` terminology-wise, and also more in line with
`group_left`/`group_right` (no `...ing` verb suffix).
We could also go the full way and call it `keep_common_labels`. That
would have the benefit of being even more consistent with the function
`drop_common_labels()` and would be more explanatory, but it also seems
quite long.
This calculates how much a counter increases over
a given period of time, which is the area under the curve
of it's rate.
increase(x[5m]) is equivilent to rate(x[5m]) * 300.
